http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
THE incredible shrinking diehard Clinton apologists,
searching for a brass lining in the pungent cloud hanging over
their man, are looking as usual in all the wrong places.

The likes of Charlie Rangel, the
jolly congressman from Harlem;
the Rev. Al Sharpton, the eminent
Brooklyn theologian, and maybe
even Julian Bond think Bill Clinton
is making up with his conscience
by "going home" to the brothers in
the shadow of the Apollo Theater,
eager to usher in Harlem
Renaissance II.

Jerry Rivers, the television
talk-show host who masquerades
as "Geraldo Rivera," calls him "the
president of 125th Street," and the
ex-prez himself insists that he first
walked Harlem streets in the '60s,
sneaking in for a visit from
London, where he was hiding out from his draft board.

"People would come up to me and ask me what I was
doing here, and I said, 'I don't know, I just like it.' It felt like
home." This sounds a lot like the fish stories he told about
how sad he was as a barefoot boy down in Arkansas, sitting
in the family's outdoor privy, reading about the wave of
Arkansas church-burnings that never happened. But if people
are willing to believe it, why not say it? (He also says he went
straight to Harlem on landing at LaGuardia Airport. If he
wants to sound like a New Yorker, he has to remember that
the flights from London land at Kennedy, not LaGuardia.)

There's a Harlem connection in Mr. Slick's past, all right,
but it has nothing to do with solidarity with the brothers and
the younger sisters. The Harlem connection is by way of the
Hot Springs connection.

Mr. Slick is merely following the example of Owney
Madden, whom Lucky Luciano allowed to retire to Hot
Springs in the 1940s to look after the digs set aside for Mafia
bosses who were sent to take the waters in Hot Springs
when they needed a nice place to cool for a spell. Owney
was the button man behind the Cotton Club when it was the
place where all the Manhattan swells went to slum, to watch
long-legged chocolate bunnies dance to the cool jazz of Duke
Ellington and Louis Armstrong. The only blacks allowed in
the Cotton Club were there to wait on and entertain the white
folks.

Owney was big in Hot Springs by the time Mr. Slick was
just a little shaver, nodding off with his head on the
coffee-shop counter at Owney's Southern Club on Central
Avenue in Hot Springs while his mama was upstairs with the
Buick dealers, plumbing-supplies salesmen, visiting
feed-and-grain men from Memphis and other down-home
socialites at the slots, blackjack tables and roulette wheels.
Owney was appreciated in Hot Springs, but from a distance.
When I was assigned by my newspaper in Little Rock to
cover the winter dinner of the Hot Springs Chamber of
Commerce circa 1955, they put Owney and his missus at the
out-of-the-way table in the corner set aside for the reporters.
He didn't seem to mind, but he noticed. "I know most of the
guys in the room," he said, looking up from the
hickory-smoked ham and raisin sauce a la Arlington Hotel,
"but they don't want to say hello tonight. That's all right. They
put me in good company." He was amused to settle for a
place next to the son of a locally famous Baptist preacher.

Mr. Slick's venture in Harlem is a lot like Owney
Madden's venture at the Cotton Club. He's a big-eye man
when it suits him, but when it's time to live his life, he goes
downtown. If it's golf, he goes all the way to Miami, where
there's a nice golf club on Indian Creek with no Indians, no
blacks and no Jews. He couldn't play with Vernon Jordan
there. "He is a complicated man, Clinton," writes Jay
Nordlinger in the Weekly Standard. "Harlem, the Met, Indian
Creek. A coalition politician for sure."

But maybe not so complicated as all that. His apologists
can't be so dense as they want us to think they were. Joe
Biden calls him "brain dead." Chuck Schumer, rested up from
trying to save the Justice Department from the Christian
hordes, affects to be horrified by the Marc Rich pardon.
Arlen Specter, trying to make up for voting against
impeachment (if not trying to set up the ex-president's critics
again), threatens a new impeachment inquiry. The story of the
ex-president at bay, intones the New York Times, as if only
now discovering where babies come from, "begins and ends
with money and the access afforded by money. That is the
unique circumstances that will linger in the minds of
Americans whenever they contemplate this gross misuse of a
solemn presidential responsibility."

But there's nothing unique about Bill Clinton's
"circumstances" at all. He's only doing what he has been
doing since he left Hot Springs, G-d love him. Owney
Madden would be proud of him. Aren't we
all?

02/13/01: Some of our riots seem to be missing02/07/01: When a hate crime is something to love02/07/01: Lifting a few spoons, cutting a few taxes02/02/01: A few small surprises and a large lesson01/31/01: Serving fried crow in the press mess01/26/01: The gathering storm over Jesse Jackson 01/23/01: A graceless getaway, a graceful beginning 01/19/01: Once more to wave the bloody shirt01/16/01: Bring on the lions, the clowns are ready01/12/01: The dastardly plot to restore slavery01/10/01: Mr. Lott's generosity to the Dems01/05/01: Looking to the past for a bad example 01/03/01: A modest proposal for Arkansas folk12/19/00: The reflexive sneer at George W. Bush12/15/00: Taking inspiration from John Birch12/12/00: It's time to raise high Florida's standards12/08/00: A President Bush, and about time, too12/05/00: Here come the judge --- and he's got a hook11/28/00: Cry no tears for Al, lawyers are the losers11/21/00: The useful loathing of America's sons11/17/00: When this is all over, we spray for lawyers11/14/00: Something murky in the twilight zone